“Because of social media and stories out there, I think the perception of the contingent workforce has been inflated,” Tom Gimbel, chief executive of Chicago-based staffing provider LaSalle Network told The New York Times in an article about the US Bureau of Labor Statistics release of new data on the contingent workforce. The BLS data found that the contingent workforce represented a smaller percentage of the US workforce in May 2017 than the last time it measured this part of the economy in February 2015.